I called NewYorker.com editor Nicholas Thompson about 9:30 a.m. CT and asked if he was aware that Lehrer’s NewYorker.com post from a week earlier was a rewrite of an October, 2011, Wall Street Journal piece. He said he wasn’t. Thompson told me he’d call Lehrer in California. The editor called back a short time later and said he couldn’t reach Lehrer, that it was early on the West Coast. He then gave me this comment for posting: “It’s a mistake. We’re not happy. It won’t happen again.” I was never called back with Lehrer’s comment – or no comment.

I put my post up at 9:53 a.m., and then watched as other publications did their Google searches and found more examples of Lehrer’s self-plagiarism.

Mr. Lehrer’s troubles began on Tuesday morning, when the media blogger Jim Romenesko noted that a June 12 post on The Frontal Cortex, Mr. Lehrer’s blog for The New Yorker, titled “Why Smart People Are Stupid,” included material recycled from a post he had written last October for The Wall Street Journal.

Within a few hours, New York magazine’s Daily Intel and other blogs had tracked down a number of other instances of self-duplication from Mr. Lehrer’s writing for Wired, the New York Times Magazine, and other publications. …

Mr. Lehrer, reached by telephone, expressed remorse about the self-borrowings but declined to comment further.